I'm only about 60 pages into it, and I must say that this section about Italy makes me insanely hungry for pasta, cheese, bread, wine, basil, tomatoes, cream puffs, and pizza. Here are a couple of examples of why...

"I eat my lunch in a quiet trattoria here, and I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in Trastevere is ever going to stop you from lingering over your meal if that's what you would like to do. I order an assortment of bruschette, some spaghetti cacio e pepe (that simple Roman specialty of pasta served with cheese and pepper) and then a small roast chicken, which I end up sharing with the stray dog who has been watching me eat my lunch the way only a stray dog can."

And then then this a few pages later...

"There's not a menu. they have only two varieties of pizza here - regular and extra cheese. None of this new age souther California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin....Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her....You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it"

I'm afraid that if the section on spiritually in India is as enticing as the eating party of the story in Italy, I may be shaving my head and wearing an orange robe very soon.

I bought this book at Costco in a what-the-heck mood. Elizabeth Gilbert's writing is fluid and fun, not unlike blog writing. It actually reads like a travel and personal blog with all the confessions, angst, non sequitors, thoughts that bled into the next "bead"/chapter and an incredible number of free form paragraphs. The amount of parenthetical notes alone blew my mind. The editors must have been chomping at the bit.

I'm enjoying it, don't get me wrong. And, I find the acceptance of such a voice encouraging. Perhaps we'll see Heather Armstrong/dooce, Eden Marriot Kennedy/Fussy and Alice Bradley/finslippy published in due time. Their storytelling is just as compelling, witty and wise.